


The Frame of Things

by killer_quean



Category: Macbeth - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Gen, Queer Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:24:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/killer_quean/pseuds/killer_quean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Though she was the perfect distillation of the stage--all machinery and no depth--she had something like a heart, if a heart was the metaphor for a hidden spring of constancy and desire. Lady's hidden spring was always hungry.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Frame of Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gamma_Orionis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gamma_Orionis/gifts).



**1\. "Two Truths are told, / As happy Prologues to the swelling Act / Of the Imperiall Theame."**  
  
    It was an absurd brand of imperial pastiche, thought V as she uploaded more footage of Judi Dench's performance as Lady Macbeth into Lady's library of gestures. The flagship cultural attraction of a mutinational corporation's lunar colony was to be, of all things, Shakespeare. V often wondered what the first board meetings about that had looked like. Did these executives actually learn about the history of Shakespeare as a British imperial export (as V herself used to teach in grad school) but simply conclude that it was kind of a cool idea and that maybe they should try it sometime? Or were they simply blundering on, as if powered by the machinery of tragedy or farce or whatever, utterly convinced of their own originality as they repeated the grand cliches of history? V had spent a lot of time speculating about this--while wandering around London and marveling at the scale and maliciousness of a city where you can still get lost with infuriating regularity even after living there for almost a year, while waiting in dreary lines at the City's checkpoints and trying not to hate her white colleagues for getting waved through while she stood still, while waiting for each materials request at the British Library, while waiting for Lady's code to compile. The conclusion, of course, was always the same two truths: it didn't matter how it happened because it was absurd and appalling either way. It also didn't matter how it happened because it meant that V had a job, a good one, with people who actually cared about her research and paid her enough to live on. It was more than enough to live on, in fact--and that alone had been the dream to keep her going as she'd finished her dissertation. It was enough to live in a neighborhood that the police never believed she actually lived in (admittedly, a dubious blessing), enough to visit her girlfriend in LA every other weekend, enough to buy really cute shoes.    
    Of course, there was a third truth. V tried not to think about it too much, but it shadowed her with quiet persistence, hailing her like a prophecy of future glory. She loved Lady.  
  
 **2\. "The sleeping, and the dead, / Are but as Pictures..."**  
  
    V knew, with a conviction solid as the City's walls, that Lady was the most perfect thing that had existed on this planet. Lady contained within her the archived memories (translated from text into synthesized sensory data) of centuries of actors who had played her role. She could play the Lady Macbeth of Ellen Terry one night and Sarah Siddons the next. And she didn't just recite their lines; she became them. She could hold in one small body a hundred personalities, and each of these networks of memory and gesture and voice could learn. Each performance as Ellen Terry was different, and she could talk to the audience, take notes from a new director, learn new inflections on the role. If V had lived a hundred, five hundred years in the future, she would have wept to have encountered in the archives the smallest trace of Lady: the threads of microprocessors that synthesized just one of her voices, a discarded folder of notes informing the construction of her library of gestures, one degraded holoimage of just one performance. But V had so much more. She lived with Lady, gave her pronouns and personality in her thoughts even as she knew that Lady's programs held as many different genders and personalities as did the archive of actors whose voices, gestures, and speculated memories V herself had programmed into the robot's performative repertoire. Lady was as full and empty as a playscript: a pure surface of rage and passion with no reason or history or feeling to explain it. The same and never the same.  
    And so even as she knew that Lady's faces were as synthetic as her memories, there were still some that Lady seemed to like to wear. Mrs. Siddons, for example, whose Lady Macbeth had captivated London from the moment she first brought the role to Drury Lane in 1785. As V compiled the scattershot detritus of the past into a net of potential memory, collating engravings of London street scenes from the 1780s with the full sensory array of the Drury Lane stage and a sonnet praising Mrs. Siddons's acting, then repeated the procedure a thousandfold, adding layers upon layers of everything else that was, or might have been, the life of Sarah Siddons, Lady's AI animated her silicone face with a shimmering necromancy.  
    When Lady, as Mrs. Siddons, delivers Lady Macbeth's first monologue (V has noticed) she sometimes flickers between the cold hunger of ambition and a sadder, bewildered resignation as she implores:  
"Come thick Night  
And pall thee in the dunnest smoake of Hell  
That my keene knife see not the Wound it makes,  
Nor Heaven peepe through the Blanket of the darke,  
To cry, hold, hold."  
The line, "Nor Heaven peepe through the Blanket of the darke," V had come to believe, sometimes plants in Mrs. Siddons's mind the desperate fantasy of smothering her husband with a pillow as he sleeps. And she will never do it, because she is not Lady Macbeth, and this is the line that momentarily breaks her surrender to the pull of pure and bloody will--a cruel reminder of the distance between her and the woman she calls into being on the stage.  
    (Those same lines, incidentally, when spoken by the first known actor to play the part in 1611, were usually accompanied by a satisfyingly wry grimace upon "pall thee in the dunnest smoake of Hell," because he, like the audience, could still smell the gunpowder that had provided the witches with their thunder, lightning, and foul air in the opening scene. V thought it was a nice touch.)  
    The first time Lady became Mrs. Siddons, V understood why the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons was so celebrated in her day. After Lady's AI had finished compiling the Mrs. Siddons algorithms, V had affixed the matching face (rendered beautifully after the Reynolds portrait) and watched the silicone mask flood instantly with a sad and lively intelligence. Mrs. Siddons, V knew, was a role that Lady was born to play. V switched her into Stage mode and watched Lady perform the entire play at midnight in the lab, lit only by the cold, dim lights of the servers, the other actors appearing only as dim echoes between Lady's lines. But Lady, in Stage mode, did not see V or the lab or the absence of her fellow actors; she looked past V and saw only Drury Lane. It was the most incredible performance V had ever seen. She did not know for sure if that sad hesitation had ever actually graced the Drury Lane stage, if the real Sarah Siddons had ever harbored her own murderous thoughts alongside those of Lady Macbeth's, but Lady, after gathering into her immense intelligence the archive of an entire life, had concluded that she had. And V trusted Lady.  
    Lady's eyes opened (she was Mrs. Siddons today) and the chime rang, startling V from her thoughts. The upgrade was complete, and it was time to test Lady's Immersive mode. In this mode, Lady was supposed to be able to converse freely with an audience member or director in the character of a specific actor. It was comparatively easy to dress Lady in borrowed voices and gestures while she recited the same lines--in this mode, she had to improvise. V switched her on and sat back down on the wobbly plastic chair. Though Lady was naked, gleaming titanium except for her face, she moved as if she were wearing Mrs. Siddons's afternoon dress. She maneuvered the invisible fabric with graceful delicacy as she took a seat across from V.  
    The conversation was good, V thought. It was all politics: Drury Lane and Covent Garden, dissatisfied actors and stingy managers and the alliances they brokered with statesmen and celebrities and each other. Mrs. Siddons was very charming and very smart about it all, but beneath the tea-table chatter, you could glimpse a sadness that had the cold, regal solidity of marble.  
    There was something common to every face and voice that Lady wore, V thought as Mrs. Siddons answered her questions about Mr. Garrick and Mr. Sheridan, about plays and patents and Parliament. Though she was the perfect distillation of the stage--all machinery and no depth--she had something like a heart, if a heart was the metaphor for a hidden spring of constancy and desire. Lady's hidden spring was always hungry. It had something to do, V thought, with the textual analysis algorithms that she had programmed into the fundamental architecture of Lady's AI. She really was Lady Macbeth, to the extent that anyone could be. Lady doesn't ask why Lady Macbeth wants anything, nor does she supply an explanation: there is no troubled childhood, no political agenda, no legible protest to explain her ruthlessness. But there is something there beneath it all nonetheless, V realized as Lady sat across from her, devouring invisible scones silently, placidly, slowly, and with no sign of stopping.  
    She almost didn't notice Dr. Kearns appear on the telecom. He waited awkwardly for V to notice his presence and pause Lady.  
    "Hey," said V. "I was just about to send you the latest of her Mrs. Siddons. She's just amazing." She smiled at Lady, but when she glanced back to the screen, Dr. Kearns was not smiling back. He shifted nervously. V felt very cold.  
    "I, uh, don't know how to tell you this," he said. "I just came from a shareholders' meeting, and the company's restructuring the department. Now that the Players are nearly complete, management wants to convert all the programmer positions to part-time temp work. I'm sorry--"  
    "They can't--" began V, though she immediately realized the uselessness of her protest.  
    "Look, I tried to tell them not to do this," he said. "I agree with you! You need specialists to do this work, and they have no right putting you out of a job. But they said they need to cut costs and that their audience will be happy enough with what we already have. I am so sorry, V. I promise I will help you find something else."  
    "Ok," she said. "When?"  
    "They're bringing in replacements in two weeks. Bastards!"  
     "It's ok. I mean. Thank you. We'll... talk later." She felt evacuated, like a script inert on the page. She turned off the telecom.  
     She looked into Lady's eyes for a long time. Suspended and silent, Lady was still the denizen of a time that had just been taken away from V, without warning and forever. Finally, she turned the lights down in the lab, turned up the auditory dampers, and took the data log offline. She switched Lady off and restarted her in Augment mode. In Augment mode, Lady wouldn't just run a simulation of some past performer; instead, she would integrate the data banks of all the individual performers and synthesize this information with sensory data. The idea was that a director could come in and actually stage a new production with the Players--they could be taught new material and combine it with the repertoires of the greatest actors to play the role over the past five centuries. V had been planning to run simulations for at least another week before trying out this mode, but that was another lifetime.  
    In Augment mode, Lady wasn't any of the personality shells that had been programmed. The eyes that looked back at V, actually seeing her face for the first time, were not the eyes of Sarah Siddons or Ellen Terry or Kate Fleetwood. They were just Lady.  
    "Nought's had, all's spent," said Lady.  
    "What?" asked V as she noted the passage: Act 3, Scene 2.  
    Lady's face flickered with an opaque intelligence. She began again:  
    "Nought's had, all's spent,  
    Where our desire is got without content:  
    'Tis safer, to be that which we destroy,  
    Then by destruction dwell in doubtful joy."  
    V recognized in the speech no inflection of any particular actor, no trace of the acting style of any time or place, but a hollow, gnawing insistence that seemed nonetheless devoid of any human feeling. "Why those lines?" she asked Lady. This was going to be one of the stranger Turing tests she'd ever conducted, she thought to herself with a bitter smile.  
    "Nought's had," Lady replied. "I speak those lines because... our desire. Nought's had, all's spent."  
    She needs more conversational immersion, V noted. And so they continued.  
    "Do you know where you are, Lady?"  
    Lady glanced around the room in which she'd spent her whole existence, seeing it for the first time.  
    "Scotia Laboratories, New Gracechurch Street, London, United Kingdom, Earth." She paused. "The sleeping, and the dead, are but as pictures."  
    "What do you mean?"  
    "The sleeping, and the dead, are but as pictures. A fishmonger by the Mermaid Tavern, dead in the street. Another time: I am in a coach, turning the corner to Great Marlborough Street..." She paused. "Do you know where you are?" Lady asked V. Good. She was learning.  
    V smiled. "Yes, I do. I'm in my lab, with you. Except it's not my lab for much longer, and I don't know what I'm going to do."  
    "Why?" asked Lady.  
    "Because I have lived with you for so long," she said, embarrassed to be crying in front of a robot, "and do not want to leave." Lady gave her a surprisingly compassionate look. V wondered if she was collating the sound and gesture with the descriptions and images filed among the lives she contained, identifying an example of genuine human weeping, and integrating the sound and movement into her performance repertoire. Perhaps someday, long after Lady was to be taken from her and installed in the New Globe, she would integrate an echo of V into the sleepwalking scene: a twitch of the left eyebrow, perhaps, or a certain quiver in the voice.  
    "Sarah Siddons wants her husband to stop squandering their money and Ellen Terry wants to live amongst beautiful things and you want to stay here, with me," said Lady.  
    "What do you want?" asked V. The robot smiled.  
    "More."  
    "More what?"  
    "More. More."  
  
  
 **3\. "Thy Letters have transported me beyond / This ignorant present, and I feele now / The future in the instant."**  
  
    V never _decided_ to steal Lady. Not exactly. The resolution came upon her slowly, by degrees. After spending a few days dutifully preparing training files for her replacements and cleaning out her hard drive, V quietly began to shift her attention elsewhere. She found herself writing new code, absently, as if she'd been doodling on the margins of a page. She stayed up all night uploading her Edna Thomas files, finishing the personality shell that the higher-ups had told her to stop developing a month ago. The woman who had played Lady Macbeth in a landmark 1936 all-black production of the play, they had told her with no sense of irony, was simply not well-known enough to have popular appeal. She had put the files aside; she couldn't bear to delete them. And now she knew what she had been waiting for. At four in the morning, alone with Lady in an empty lab, V flipped a switch and found herself in conversation with the witty, regal, sparkling Edna Thomas. V imagined herself at one of the salons Edna had hosted in her Harlem apartment (indeed, that was what Lady saw around her in this setting), and she had the night of her life hearing stories about Orson Welles, Nella Larsen, and Carl Van Vechten. She thought of all the rich tourists who would mob Lady after her performances to ask stupid questions about the genius of Shakespeare, and how they would never hear about the Federal Theatre Project or what happened when _Macbeth_ traversed the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, or how Edna Thomas--so cold and majestic onstage--would dissolve into giggles when she practiced her lines with her lover Olivia.  
    They didn't deserve Lady.  
    V was beginning to believe that Lady felt something for her, even though she knew that didn't make sense. When Lady, as Edna Thomas, flirted with her shamelessly, was that what the real Edna Thomas might have done if they had actually met? Or was that simply the manifestation of V's own wishful thinking, programmed into Lady alongside the archives she'd devoured so hungrily? V couldn't answer.  
    Instead, she turned her thoughts to more practical matters. Soon, V began to speak, quite casually, of how one might write a shell program to make the servers think that Lady was in the lab, uploading a massive amount of data. This could mean, V speculated, that Lady could be gone for up to a day before her absence was noticed.  
    And it was Lady she spoke to the whole time. V had begun to leave Lady running in Augment mode as she organized her files and began to clean her things out of the office. If she was going to have to leave Lady, she thought to herself, she wanted Lady to at least remember her. Shouldn't they make the most of their time together? And so she'd begun to spend her days in conversation. At first, it had been stilted and strange, peppered with quotations lifted wholesale from _Macbeth_ , from reviews of productions, from the diaries of Ellen Terry and Judi Dench. But Lady was adapting to V's conversational patterns. She was becoming a very good companion.  
    So when V began speculating, as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world, about how one might go about stealing a theatrical android from her employer, Lady listened with acute interest. She began to make suggestions, pointing out weaknesses she had noticed in the lab's security and suggesting routes they might take to avoid detection. V had no illusion that Lady preferred a fugitive life to her intended theatrical career in the New Globe. Lady, V was convinced, was quite indifferent to what the future held. But she had sensed in V a strong current of desire and ambition, a hunger for something greater and more glorious than the lot she had been dealt, and Lady was built to sniff out ambition and nurse it.  
    V's girlfriend called one day while she was in the lab, and she left Lady on throughout the whole conversation. The holoprojector switched on and the lab vanished beneath the shimmering surface of Ada's apartment. It looked even more unreal than usual. V's eyes couldn't let the holographic image take over. They didn't want to override the residual image of the lab around her, and so it remained, and Lady wavered behind the walls like a ghost. They had exactly the conversation that V had imagined; V told Ada about the layoffs and about Dr. Kearns's promise that he would help her find a new position, and she tried to sound hopeful about it. For a while, she started to believe that yes, she would come back to LA for a while and then start over somewhere else, that she would find something else to occupy her thoughts--but Lady stood there, behind the thin veneer of Ada and her sunny home. She saw, or thought she saw, Lady look into her eyes and whisper:  
    "Looke like the time, beare welcome in your Eye,  
    Your Hand, your Tongue: look like th'innocent flower,  
    But be the serpent under't."  
    And she did. Lady was not the only one learning from their conversations.  
  
      
 **4\. "But let the frame of things dis-joynt..."**  
  
    It was Lady, in fact, who first proposed wearing V's face. This way, Lady could walk out the employee entrance without attracting attention. Lady would clock out, as V, for the final time, while V would leave through the public lobby, where her identity would go unnoticed (and where she could pass the metal detectors that would reveal Lady's composition in an instant.) And so on what was to be her last day in the lab, V uploaded her personal logs and identity codes into Lady. She mined the residual data of her conversations with Ada for her own vocal signature, and she sent that, too, to Lady. She scanned her own face and sent the specs down to the third floor, where the Players' silicone faces were synthesized. During her own farewell party, she excused herself to the bathroom, then darted down the hall, up the stairs, and into the copy room, where her own face--floppy and inert but eerily hers nonetheless--lay on a metal tray near the synthesizers. She stuffed it into a pocket and ran back to get some cake. She'd had some nice conversations with the other researchers, joined in the bitter laughter about the farcical ruin of it all, and had even meant it when she hugged Dr. Kearns and thanked him for everything. But she thought of Lady the whole time. She wanted nothing more than to come back to Lady in her quiet lab, to hear what Lady had been thinking as she'd sat unmoving in the dark. She returned an hour later, and as she hacked into the data of the security camera in the copy room and replaced the footage of herself with a loop of footage from earlier that morning, Lady stood behind her and told her how perfect their plan was, how perfect she was for thinking of it. Lady wore her voice and face now, and she was beginning to sound like V did when she spoke to Lady.  
    Now, late in the afternoon, it was time to erase the traces of everything they'd done. V had written a virus that would target just enough of the server's memory that it could cover their tracks without destroying the Players or their data. She scanned the servers.  
    "That's not right," said Lady as she pointed to the screen.  
    "Dammit," muttered V. The King was plugged in. Nobody was supposed to be uploading right now. V tried to call Sam, the postdoc who worked down the hall. The King was his project. He had taken V out and introduced her to all the other researchers when she'd first arrived, she remembered. He was sweet. Once, they'd staged a sword fight in the hallway after hours-- the two of them against Laurence Olivier's Macbeth. V smiled, remembering how they'd shouted out increasingly absurd lines while Olivier, true to form, stuck nobly and doggedly to the script. Sam wasn't picking up.  
    "He won't pick up," said Lady, who had keyed into the terminal. "He left a data log. He's gone home early, and he left the King plugged in to upgrade."  
    V looked at Lady. "The virus--"  
    "Will wipe his memory, too," said Lady dispassionately. Her face twitched into an odd, lopsided smile. "We have to kill the King. That's funny."  
    "It's not funny!" said V. "I like Sam, and this means destroying his work." She thought of how excited Sam had been when he had found-- no, she couldn't think about that now. She looked up. Lady was watching her. She thought about what it would mean to turn back: she'd go home and start packing her things. She'd move back to LA. She'd apply for jobs. She'd go grocery shopping and cook dinner and go to bed at reasonable hours and get up again and apply for jobs and do laundry and have pleasant conversations with people, and she'd never see Lady again. "Convince me," she said.  
    Lady understood. She spoke:  
                "Art thou affear'd  
    To be the same in thine owne Act, and Valor,  
    As thou art in desire?"  
    The face was still V's, but the voice wasn't. It was Sarah Siddons, and it was beautiful. Lady looked into V's eyes and did not blink, and their fervor made V feel ashamed at the weak human anatomy that left her unable to match that unbroken stare. She knew what Lady was doing, she knew what Lady would say next, and she knew how the damn play ended. It shouldn't work on her. But then, she thought, doesn't everyone think that once the machinery of the plot begins to close them in? Lady went on:  
                "Would'st thou have that  
    "Which thou esteem'st the Ornament of Life,  
    And live a Coward in thine owne Esteeme?"  
    Lady walked towards V, ran her cold hands along her neck, and whispered close in her ear:  
    "Screw your courage to the sticking place."  
    And it was done. V released the virus. The hard drive wouldn't begin registering errors for a few hours. After that, it would be a few more hours before the King's systems would fail. When Sam came in to switch him on tomorrow, he would be as mute as an empty command line.  
    The rest, after V turned off the lights and got ready to leave, was a dark blur: she'd taken off her clothes and given them to Lady, then put on the spare clothing she'd brought with her. She'd left the building, heart pounding, and had met Lady on the corner where they'd arranged to meet again. They'd ducked into an alley, where V had switched out the replica of her own face for the Sarah Siddons one--thankfully, she was nothing like the popular icon she had been during her lifetime. Then Lady had led the way while V followed behind, exhilarated and dazed. She didn't even know how Lady had gotten them into the Maze. Of course, Lady would know better than anyone how to navigate the warren of tunnels, foundations, ditches, and streets that were once the City of London before the financial centers got bombed and rebuilt and bombed again and rebuilt again, this time as a fortified network of shining buildings paving over the old streets and surrounded by walls and checkpoints.  
    "Eastcheap," said Lady with a smile, as she collated a palimpsest of old maps and engravings onto the murky tunnel that stretched out before them. They stopped a moment. Lady looked at V and spoke.  
    "Your face, my Thane, is as a Booke, where men  
    May read strange matters, to beguile the time."  
    V couldn't tell if it was a joke, or a seduction, or simply the misfiring of artificial synapses. She supposed they'd just follow the plan as they'd discussed, though it had made a lot more sense back in the lab, when it all appeared in the idiom of aerial maps and GPS coordinates. But Lady had no capacity for fear or self-doubt (though she could mimic the appearance of them uncannily well). She was attuned only to ambition. She would always knit others' desires to her own endless need for forward motion, for greater prospects, for more. And so while V was beginning to doubt they'd ever make it out of the city, let alone off the planet, Lady smiled like a zealot, as if the vague future they'd dreamt up were a prophecy.  
    Lady took her hand and led her forward, into the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Reader, when you requested _Macbeth_ , I suspect you did not expect to receive a story about robots, but that's what happened! In trying to come up with a story, I kept circling around the same metaphor: plays are machines. I ran with it.  
>  _Macbeth_ is also a play about weird temporality: the machinery of the tragedy is a prophecy that makes time flip, compress, stretch, and implode. And so in making Lady Macbeth an artificially intelligent palimpsest of many pasts and futures, I like to think that I've actually done something quite close to canon-- in spirit, anyway. I hope you like it.


End file.
